My Life Flashing Very Slowly Before My Eyes

So I called the Moneris customer service line the other day on behalf of a client, asking how to log in to a "sandbox" area where I could test a Magento payment gateway for Moneris credit cards as well as the Canadian Interac payment method. The customer service rep gave my the URL to their test environment and told me to log into the developer portal as the "De-Mouser" user.

I paused, and asked, "Are you saying that the login is DEE - MOUSER?!?"

"Yes," he replied.

I paused again, thought about it, and asked... "Do you mean DEMO USER?"

What the?!?

This level-two customer service agent has been telling people for who-knows-how-long that the login "demouser" is de-mouser. Hilarious and amazing!

Is it possible that the hunt-and-peck typing style actually PREVENTS carpal tunnel syndrome? Perhaps keeping your hands positioned stationary at "home row" and moving only the fingers is the reason the wrists get sore? I was wondering if maybe the "two-fingered pecker" that moves his hands around the keyboard actually has an advantage in that they are moving their wrists more dynamically...

I failed biology so I'll leave it to the scientific researchers to conduct the study. I just wanted to get the observation on record so maybe someone can figure that out for the good of all the "good" typists out there?

The following numbers can be used for testing credit card payment systems - they are correctly formatted and such, and using them cannot generate a charge. They are reserved for specifically this purpose, so use them with confidence! The expiration date you use must be a valid date in the future (use the mmyy format).

Test Credit Card Account Numbers:

American Express 378282246310005

American Express 371449635398431

American Express Corporate 378734493671000

Australian BankCard 5610591081018250

Diners Club 30569309025904

Diners Club 38520000023237

Discover 6011111111111117

Discover 6011000990139424

JCB 3530111333300000

JCB 3566002020360505

MasterCard 5555555555554444

MasterCard 5105105105105100

Visa 4111111111111111

Visa 4012888888881881

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Excerpt from an article written Jan 30th, 2007 by Will Tschumy, a former colleague of mine who worked in the San Francisco office of Scient - one of the "Little Five" dot-com consultancies of the bubble era:

My Religious Moment: As many of us did in the early days of the web, we learned by doing. I spent a lot of time doing a combination of Producer / Project Manager work and Information Architecture in Siegel & Gale in the early days. When NY started to get to me, I decided to move to SF. Within a week, I’d accepted an offer with Scient, where I eventually became a Director of Experience Strategy.

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Software Development projects are like air - they will fill the container you put them in.

If you give a developer a time estimate that is too short you will hear about it. On the other hand, if you don't hear anything, count on the effort coming in very close to the amount you projected. What ever happened to coming in significantly under budget?

When you say a project will last, let's say, four months - you will find work to do for four months! Then, when the deadline draws near you will go into panic mode to finish. What if that project was only estimated at three months? The exact same thing would have happened! You'd find work to do for three months, and panic when the deadline approaches!

Generals will fight wars, and project teams, well - they do projects. Hmm.

Now that AdBrite has gone out of business, Clicksor - one of the last major alternatives to Google AdSense advertising - should be showing signs of strengthening. On the contrary, it seems the Clicksor network may also be on the ropes; their advertisements are featuring a growing percentage of malware and porn.

Having problems finding support with adding a product search in Drupal Commerce? Assuming you've gotten as far as installing the Search API, Views Search integration and set up your service/server/index, you're now wrestling with why the name of your index is not showing up in the drop-down for "Show: in Views add. Note: If you haven't gotten that far, go back to Google (GBTG?) cuz help is available. If you have, read on.

Site builder shootout: Drupal vs. Joomla vs. WordPress
Need to build a high-end website? We test three of the top free site-building applications.

By Brian Proffitt
September 14, 2011 06:00 AM ET

Building a website has never been easier. Gone -- mostly -- are the days of having to hand-code HTML and PHP scripts in order to get a slick, fully functional website, thanks to the capabilities of content management systems that do most or all of the heavy lifting for site creators.